When comparing Slack vs Keybase, the Slant community recommends Slack for most people. In the question“What is the best team chat software?”Slack is ranked 1st while Keybase is ranked 32nd. The most important reason people chose Slack is:

Slack integrates with tools like Trello, GitHub, Dropbox, Mailchimp, and dozens of others, so you can have a centralized event feed of your project right alongside your chat. This is tremendously useful for keeping context with your discussions.

Pros

Pro

Robust integration with a huge number of tools

Slack integrates with tools like Trello, GitHub, Dropbox, Mailchimp, and dozens of others, so you can have a centralized event feed of your project right alongside your chat. This is tremendously useful for keeping context with your discussions.

Pro

@mentions

You can ping people to get their attention even if they are not online by @mentioning them. Slack supports desktop notifications.

Pro

Very polished user experience

The entire Slack interface is polished and intuitive to use. There are very few bugs or inconsistencies in the UI and it's very fast to use. There is nothing in particular that is new with Slacks implementation of team chat, but the execution of the groups (called channels), search, external service integration and notifications is close to perfect.

Pro

Drag & drop files in channels

You can upload a file to any channel over HTTPS simply by dragging and dropping.

Pro

Apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mac OS, Linux, and Windows

Slack has apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mac OS, Linux, and Windows to give you the full functionality of Slack with some extra features not found on the website on most major platforms.

Pro

Fantastic search functionality

You can deep search messages, files and snippets. Given Slacks integration into many external services, Slack is good enough to act as the central search interface for your entire team.

Pro

Syntax coloring

Pasted code can be colored based on syntax.

Pro

Supports multiple teams

You can be signed into multiple teams simultaneously and quickly switch between them.

Pro

Edit messages easily

It allows you to change what you sent by hovering to the message and selecting "Edit message" under the ellipsis (...).

Pro

Inline link previews (photos, mockups, etc.)

When a link is added, some content in the link is shown such as image - like how Facebook does it when you share a link.

Pro

Emoji reactions to limit excessive posts and notifications

Pro

Flexible, granular notification settings

Notifications are handled separately for mobile and the web app. You can receive notifications for all messages, just direct messages, or based on filters, and you can have different settings for different channels: you don't have to get notified every time someone pushed to GitHub or every time someone posts to off-topic chat, unless you want to.

Pro

Freemium plan

Free forever, only restriction on searchable message archives, up to 10k of your team’s most recent messages and 10 apps or service integration. Great for trying out first.

Pro

Slackbot extensible chat robot

The "Slackbot" can is an extensible robot that can be set you remind you about tasks, auto respond to certain phrases and a variety of other functionality.

Pro

Shows local time of each participant

You can click on the profile of a user to see their local time. An especially useful feature when members of your team are working in different timezones.

Pro

Dev team is invested, responsive, and friendly

Having submitted both feedback and support requests for bot development, I can personally attest that the team takes feedback seriously, and responds quickly to communication. This is vital for any closed-source or hosted project.

Pro

IRC connectivity over SSL

Pro

Multiple channels for different groups

Pro

Self chatting

Creative implementation which is very good for personal journaling or drafting/collecting ideas. Previously, to do this, users needed to create a private channel with themselves. Note that some other team-chat apps may disallow creating group/channel with no 2nd person(s).

Pro

It can surprise you

There's a checkbox in preferences under advanced options that may surprise you.

Pro

E2E encrypted

Completely end-to-end encrypted.

Pro

250GB of free team file storage

250GB of free storage for encrypted files in a team.

Pro

250GB of free private file storage

250GB of free storage for privately-encrypted files.

Pro

Shared private encrypted filesystem

Share files securely and privately with other users, a group of users, or a team.

Pro

Public encrypted filesystem

For sharing files publicly.

Pro

Encrypted Git

Encrypted private or team Git repositories with automatic commit signatures.

Pro

Encrypted file sharing

Securely share files.

Pro

Private encrypted filesystem

Securely store personal files that only you can access.

Pro

FOSS

Free (as in beer) and Open Source Software.

Pro

Public teams

Teams can be public with open access or admin-approved access. Opt-in to list public teams.

Pro

Sigchain verification

Pro

Blockchain technology

Pro

Free static site hosting

Host a public static website for free. Sites are automatically viewable via keybase.pub if an index.html or index.md exist in your public files.

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Cons

Con

Expensive when you need to upgrade

At $6.67 per user / month (or $8 if billed monthly) , Slack is significantly more expensive than the competition if you need features such as unlimited integrations (more than 10) or unlimited message storage (more than 10,000). However, the free version of Slack includes unlimited users.

However if you need only unlimited messages you can use storage services like https://slarck.com to upload then browse and search your entire message history, while staying in Slack's free plan. So with a combo of Slack+Slarck this con is not that major.

Con

No self-hosting available

If you are worried about third-parties getting access to your data you should consider self-hosting. With self-hosting you are in control over where your data is stored, who has access to it. You will also not be vulnerable to exploits of a third-party provider.

Con

Hidden max limit of free users per channel

Slack says that their free accounts support an unlimited number of users, which is true. However they don't mention that there is an undisclosed maximum number of users per channel (8462). For a large open source community, this is something to keep in mind.

Con

Proprietary (non-free/libre)

Con

Linux client is very RAM intensive

Con

"Native" desktop apps are web apps

While it's great that Slack provides installable apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux, they're just the Slack web app wrapped in Electron shell. This means they don't offer the same level of native UX that a truly native toolkit app would.

Con

Slow and lags sometimes

Con

API doesn't allow custom widgets in chat

Con

No E2E encryption

Data is sent of SSL only, not E2E encrypted.

Con

Awful performance and constant glitches, since it is Chromium-based

You will experience a lot of hangs and glitches and it eats immense (for as basic as UI is) amount of RAM.

Con

API is overall very poor

Can't do much with integrations.

Con

Replies are the worst feature implementation of all time

No cons yet!

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